


gilded tombs do worms enfold

by TomBowline



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Illnesses, Imminent Death, M/M, Watch Chains
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-12
Updated: 2021-02-12
Packaged: 2021-03-16 19:55:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29337897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TomBowline/pseuds/TomBowline
Summary: In the vast blasted emptiness Edward remembers Commander Fitzjames.Fill for day five of Rarepair Week, “A missed opportunity”, loosely based onthis terror_exe tweet.
Relationships: James Fitzjames/Edward Little
Comments: 2
Kudos: 29
Collections: The Terror Rarepair Week 2021





	gilded tombs do worms enfold

**Author's Note:**

> SORRY

In the vast blasted emptiness Edward remembers Commander Fitzjames. 

He is alone now— He thinks he is alone. Nobody stirs from the half-collapsed tents, nobody approaches the fire to feed. For himself he has eaten, vomited, eaten again; now he is very thirsty, and endeavoring to endure it. There is no water here. 

His lips meet each other, dry and sore, and it’s then that he recalls him - bits and dust-ground pieces, the last three years of his life and all the years before that too going to nothingness. It doesn’t matter. He’ll be gone soon. He is alone and he’ll be gone soon, so he sits and thinks, drawing memories up like a fisherman with a net full of holes.

He starts at the beginning, or what he can make out of it: flashes of a sunlit deck with whale oil in the air, dinners that still tasted of food, everything aglow with newness and prestige and Fitzjames most of all. He was the sort of officer Edward always wanted to be - glittering effortlessly, commanding with grace, tall and broad without being imposing and athletic without being uncouth. He remembers how conversation would flow from Fitzjames’ mouth like gold - he doesn’t recall the words, now, nor even the sound of his voice, but the mouth itself has stuck fast in his mind. Nimble tongue and bold teeth and thin shapely lips. 

Too often he imagined that mouth and what it might do. Alone in his berth he would rub himself pathetically to the thought of hot breath on his neck, bold teeth on his lips, long hair falling over the back of his neck like a sheaf of wheat. Hands too - Edward remembers his hands. Steady, large, graceful like the man; wrapped around a fork, around a telescope, around Edward’s thighs to pull him apart for the taking. Strong enough to lift him, pin him, keep him where he would. 

He remembers also the end of it, all that strength poured out, all burning thoughts and feelings burned away to be replaced by wincing sorrow at the sight of him: the way his mouth chapped and bled, the mess of his hair and the quaking dirtiness of his hands. He’d always been fastidious about— about everything, really, hair and nails and uniform. It had made Edward feel ashamed in a glowing sort of way, like a hot coal in his stomach, for left to himself he was never the most attentive to these things. Better than him, Fitzjames was better than him in every way - _In need of correction,_ he once imagined the man drawling at him, _Not up to my standards,_ whereupon he would punish him sweetly for his laxity - but in the end, oh— He fell apart like straw. How wretched it was to see. 

It makes Edward afraid, despite having long since come to terms with following in that way, to remember the dragging breath and the stinking blood. Perhaps it is because there is nobody here for him as there was for the commander, nobody to hold his hand and help him through it. Nobody to cover his body when it was over - how wrong it seemed, obscuring him like that, when he had been so radiant in life. Couldn’t be helped, of course. He did it with love, as much as he still had in him; the stones cut his hands and coated them in dust, and it felt right it should be so. Anyone who cared to watch him work would see how carefully he went, how he avoided feeling in his hands the sewn-up sack that contained the commander’s body. It unsettled him, the idea of coming in contact with flesh that had once been someone dear and lively and was now a _thing,_ rigid and cold as the stones beneath it. He prayed Captain Crozier would not see such feebleness in his actions, but he needn’t have worried; the captain had other duties to attend to.

He would dearly love for either of them to appear now, the captain or Fitzjames, even as an apparition - just so long as he could have someone near him. He feels for a moment as if he might cry, but he rolls the urge over with a resigned sort of strength; he can’t make tears anymore, and it’ll only hurt more to try. 

Anyway, he knows he’s dying - of what, he can’t remember, but it’s the same for all of them. Perhaps hunger, given what he has eaten. But hunger does not make one bleed so. Illness, then, lurking implacably. He personally has hardly bled at all, which disturbs him. It feels somehow as if he’s getting off too easily, or as if he will not die at all, which would be worse by far.

In the preceding weeks, when Le Vesconte was bleeding, he had all sorts of stories about Fitzjames, and in the manner of a talkative man who is dying he did not care much to whom he was speaking. Edward will resent him for abandoning the captain until he loses his reason, but he cannot help feeling gratitude for what he has been told. He remembers it, now, better than he remembers Fitzjames himself. _How he loved to look fine,_ Le Vesconte would say with a faraway smile on his face. _He bought gold chains and jewels in India, and I started to buy them for him. I would secret them away and— and when he saw— Oh, he’d smile. The skin on the back of his neck— I would hang them off him like he was an empress. We were only young._ His voice was going already, by then, or else it just hurt to talk, but talk he did - as if he were a great historian, and needed this most important of events to be committed to the earth before he left it. James Fitzjames and his wide smile and his tan skin and his taste in finery, desperate not to be forgotten, making others desperate not to forget. 

Edward listened each day - for there was more, there was a great flood of such talk that was staunched only when Le Vesconte could no longer move his jaw - with the dedication of a priest and rather more zeal, clinging to the bright jewels of memory like a starving man to fresh fruit. When he died at last Edward found not the catharsis he had expected in dealing the begged-for blow, nor in hacking him up to feed the sallow shambling flock of sailors he had left. There was no justice, no getting his own back, just the unholy mess of a man who tried to avoid dying for as long as possible. 

(It was in the process of washing Le Vesconte’s skin of the indignities that precede death that Edward discovered he lacked the ability to cry, and it shamed him, for he knew the tears he was trying for would not be for the man whose body he handled but for the stories that man would no longer tell.)

Edward is now at the limit of avoiding death. He is sitting like a rabbit in a clearing and waiting for it to sink its claws in. But as he waits he is winding the chain of his pocket-watch around his fingers and thinking. 

He thinks of James Fitzjames, better than he ever was. 

He thinks of James Fitzjames, his skin splitting open and his eye bleeding over. 

He thinks of James Fitzjames, young and laughing and draped in gold and jewels. 

When he makes the first wound there’s no peace in the pain, no justice - no copious blood flows down, no key falls from heaven. But as he drapes the chain across his face he imagines a crowded market in India and a tall man beside him bearing long hair and a pristine uniform and the glowing tan skin of health, shouldering him towards a table decked with golden earrings, _Pick one._ He imagines a humid lower deck, a Great Cabin with sun streaming in, and the prick of a practiced needle through his ear - face held firm in large and steady hands, no flinching away. He imagines a kiss to his cheek, thin shapely lips curled up in a smile, warm and soft and glittering like gold.


End file.
